Can you even name a recent RPG made from scratch that only took 1-2 years?
Does New Vegas count as "recent"? It was supposedly made in 18 months :-P.
I can't think of any but the sort of RPGs i've played in recent times are either very old games that doesn't make sense to even consider them or made by tiny teams / solo devs that again time stacked against them (especially if they were made in full or partial in the dev's free time). And TBH i almost never check how long it took to develop the games i play :-P unless somehow that aspect stands out.
I don't know how good (or not) it is as an RPG (since it seems to be based on a Disco Elysium style system that not everyone here agrees is an RPG), but by browsing Steam's "New & Trending" category i found
Vampire: The Masquerade - Heartless Lullaby which from a quick search of its development history turns out it was made at ~7 months. Of course that is a short game.
AoD took a decade. Colony Ship is taking six+ years. Underrail took seven years. Atom RPG took three years. Black Geyser took seven years. Disco Elysium took three years.
AFAIK AoD was made in their spare time which is a very different thing as that alone can be a time sink. Also (AFAIK again) it was the first game and as such they were learning as they went which means they made a bunch of mistakes (=time) that they wouldn't make if they had more experience. Atom RPG seemed to be made in spare time as well with the development picking up after Kickstarter - and after the Kickstarter they didn't took much time to release the game.
But yes, there are RPGs that took a lot of time to be made, i didn't really argued for that though. What i wrote was that RPGs can be made in less time, not that all RPGs could have been made in 1-1.5y.
Battle Brothers went from Pre-Alpha to release in about 3 years. The team had 4 members (3 initially, if I am not mistaken) - 1 was the programmer and 1 was the artist. And these guys were VERY conscious to not get stuck in development hell due to feature creep. But for some time Battle Brothers was their part-time job as they had full-time jobs. They went into full-time development at some point.
Working part time can be a big time drain, what i was referring to was about people working fulltime on a game.
Conscript - 1-man project was Kickstarted in July, 2020. The game is going to be 5-7 hours long, so a fairly short one (although it is supposed to have high replayability).
1-man projects are kinda special because even a second person can almost double the performance since even if they aren't that great, it helps not having
everything done by yourself. So it makes more sense for these projects - especially for RPGs - to take longer.
Also what i was thinking about wasn't even 1-4 people teams but teams of like ~15-20 people. It isn't like the less people the better, but above ~50 people you start to introduce a lot of inefficiencies.
So I'd say you're too optimistic about small games taking 1-1,5 year.
Note that i refer to RPGs specifically, which tend to be more complex than other types of games. Other types of games, including some genre defining ones, were made in way less time than that during the 90s (though of course expectations are different nowadays).
Also i note that i wrote it is possible to have an RPG made in ~1-1.5 year, not that all games would be like that. One thing i think i was explicit about was to scope for that time and not try to pretend you are a AAA team. I've worked on a team where an artist spent literally days on a couple of knife models, trying to get everything just right - but in a small team that mindset wont work, you'd need to get those knives made in a matter of hours at most. Will they look worse than even Skyrim? Of course they'll do, but if you are making a game with the scope of Skyrim and with a team that is less than Skyrim's team size then you are certainly not working on a game that'd be made in 1-1.5 years.
